


If Happy Ever After Did Exist

by SureAsEggs



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: (the Feelings are implied but Ed is a notoriously unreliable interpreter of feelings), Domestic, Fluff, Gen, Pre-Isabella happiness, aka the calm before the storm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-17
Updated: 2017-10-17
Packaged: 2019-01-18 13:04:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12388641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SureAsEggs/pseuds/SureAsEggs
Summary: Just a very nice morning in the lives of two men who never were and likely never will be more content than they were together.





	If Happy Ever After Did Exist

**Author's Note:**

> (...Yes, the title is from Payphone by Maroon 5.)

Ed wakes up too early for no reason in particular. There are no guards making a racket on the other side of a locked door. No nightmare of desperate hands choking the life from a beautiful girl. Just the light from the window, warming his blankets and eyelids and beckoning him to get up and come downstairs for coffee.

He spends too long looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, at the lack of bruises beneath his eyes and at the smile he can’t school his mouth into abandoning. At how full and healthy and alive he looks, detailed and well cared for, like an artist bled love and attention onto a canvas until it became everything it was always meant to be.

He can’t be grateful enough to Oswald, he thinks over breakfast. He listens to Gotham’s beloved mayor rant about something from the morning paper, some article Ed will read and evaluate later, and feels warm and affectionate watching the annoying way Oswald brutalizes his soft boiled egg.

They have a full day ahead of them: they’ll lock eyes in a crowded room and decide the fate of the city, they’ll pass the hearts and minds of the people back and forth between their cupped hands, and then they’ll eat dinner again at this table, they’ll go to bed in adjacent rooms and fall asleep to the sounds of the house settling in around them.

Ed belongs.

He _belongs_.

He traces the wood grain of the table and Oswald doesn’t say a thing, doesn’t find it odd that Ed notices things he doesn’t. The funny thing is that it’s Oswald who sees so much Ed will never know.

Oswald will never love riddles, but only because there’s some magic in him that doesn’t separate questions from answers. Ed will never truly enjoy politics, but only because he doesn’t understand the appeal of sharing a vision with people who can’t see it.

They try for each other, though. And if Oswald is half as moved by learning how Ed’s mind works as Ed is by watching the world dance at Oswald’s fingertips, then perhaps Ed had known more than he’d understood when he first thought of Oswald in terms of fate.

Oswald eventually notices Ed isn’t listening to him. He takes it out on his bread, so easily made anxious by the idea that Ed doesn’t care that it’s secretly quite flattering.

“I’m sorry,” Ed says, and he is. “I was caught up for a moment. I’ve just been thinking all morning about how happy I am.”

Even when it manifested as petty tantrums in Ed’s old apartment, Oswald’s emotion has always been a beautiful thing. It’s clear enough to be unmistakable, even where Ed has difficulty reading most people. There’s a force, a lucidity, a truth in Oswald that could drive a man to breathlessness.

Even now, his smile leaves Ed giddy.

Oswald is happy too, they both feel it, they’ve both found what they’ve been waiting for.

Grinning down at the smeared jam on his plate, Ed thinks:

_Just like this. Let everything stay just this way, forever._


End file.
